Interconversion between #FHIR and HL7 v2

Jun 12, 2017

Question

What advice do you give for introducing FHIR in new software, while continuing to maintain HL7v2 interoperability with client applications that do not speak FHIR?

For example, are FHIR resources the way to go as an internal representation of an application’s health care data?

If yes, is it practical to convert HL7 messages into FHIR resources (e.g. Patient, Practitioner, ProcedureRequest, ReferralRequest, Appointment…)? What open source software do you recommend for converting HL7 messages into FHIR resources (and vice-versa)?

Or is it better to use FHIR for external information exchange only (with outside FHIR clients)?

Answer

I’ve worked with several projects rebuilding their products around FHIR resources. Like all development methodologies, this has pros and  cons. What you get out of the box is a highly interoperable system, and you get a lot of stuff for free. But when your requirements go beyond what’s in the specification, it starts to get hard - FHIR is an interoperability standard, that focuses on the lowest common denominator: what everyone agrees with. Whether that’s a net benefit depends on how far beyond common agreement your going to go. (This, btw, is a demonstration of my 3rd law of interoperability).

It is practical to convert HL7 messages to FHIR resources and vice versa, yes. We’ve seen plenty of that going on. But there’s no canned solution, because to do the conversion, you have to do two things:

  • Figure out all the arcane business logic and information variants and code this into the conversion
  • Figure out how to integrate your conversion logic into your application framework

The upshot of this is that you have a programming problem, and most people solve this by taking a open source libraries for v2 and FHIR in the language of their choice (most languages have one of those) and writing the business logic and application integration in their development language of choice. Hence, there’s no particular open source library to do the job other than the parsers etc. There are some commercial middleware engines that include FHIR as one of the formats that can be supported.

In the FHIR spec, we’ve defined a mapping language that tries to abstract this - so you can separate the business logic from the application integration, and a platform independent business logic that has libraries for whatever platform. That’s an idea that is gradually starting to gather some interest, but is still a long way from maturity.

With regard to using FHIR for external exchange only… what I usually say about this that is that it makes sense to implement FHIR for new things first, and then to replace old things only when they become a problem. And most new stuff is on the periphery, where the architectural advantages to FHIR are really big. But internally, v2 will increasingly become a major service limitation in time, and will have to be replaced. The open question is how long that timeline is. We don’t know yet.